Wednesday, April 14, 2010

Twitter Does The Deed: Ads

....finally answering the question of how the company expects to turn its exponential growth into revenue.....Promoted Tweets....in the stream of Twitter posts, based on how relevant they might be to a particular user.....Twitter.com had 22.3 million unique visitors in March, up from 524,000 a year ago.... the first significant step toward a businessmodel..... and when someone rolls over a promoted post with a cursor, it turns yellow. .... chatter on Twitter can forecast box-office revenue for movies ....“Media like Twitter and Facebook are so enormous that it’s very hard to imagine it would be easy to manipulate the conversation.” ...... Twitter will measure what it calls resonance, which takes into account nine factors, including the number of people who saw the post, the number of people who replied to it or passed it on to their followers, and the number of people who clicked on links......Once Twitter figures out how to measure the number of people who read posts other than on Twitter.com, it will also allow third-party developers to show ads and share revenue.

"....and when someone rolls over a promoted post with a cursor, it turns yellow...."

That color coding was an idea I had promoted at my blog. The tweet ads have to look different from the regular tweets, obviously different. And color coding is the best way to achieve that.

Google did not do banner ads like Yahoo. Similary Facebook could not do Google ads. And Twitter ads have to be specific to the Twitter platform. Tweets are it.

Resonance. I like the term.

Twitter has taken its first big step in the monetization department. This might be the only step necessary. They could spend a few years just getting this one right and scaling it. Ultimately the process has to be automated just like for the Google ads. Most of the money will come from small businesses targeting locals.

Now I am going to bug Twitter a little less about going IPO, just a little less. It could now take its sweet time.